


it's not having what you want, it's wanting what you've got

by orphan_account



Category: Dreamer Trilogy - Maggie Stiefvater, Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Established Relationship, Introspection, M/M, The Barns (Raven Cycle), i think about how much ronan and adam love each other and it makes me forget how to act
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-07
Updated: 2020-08-07
Packaged: 2021-03-05 20:41:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,341
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25771531
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: He loves Adam for a long time. It’s hard to put a name to it, because he’s used to love being easy; his mother’s mouth pressed to the crown of his head, his father snatching him up into a hug, wrestling on the lawn with Matthew, reading comics with Declan on the porch with their elbows pressed together. Loving Adam is being pushed away as much as loving Adam is coming back, so it doesn’t connect for a while. But the clues are there.
Relationships: Ronan Lynch/Adam Parrish
Comments: 4
Kudos: 83





	it's not having what you want, it's wanting what you've got

The memories of being young are always strange and bitten off; half-grown things he no longer knows the shape of. Blue says _it’s not only you, that’s just what it’s like to have a brain._ Which he knew already. Learned long ago that handling memories makes them unreliable; that they tarnish when you touch them. But the alternative is forgetting, which is not really an alternative at all.  
  
They’re out in front of the Barns when Adam asks, “How do you make people up?” He's sitting with his legs pulled up underneath him, a book in his hands, one foot dangling off the edge of the porch swing and the other in Ronan’s lap.   
“Well,” Ronan starts, “when a mommy and a daddy love each other very much-” but Adam gives him a look, so he stops. “I’m not sure. You just do.”  
“ _You_ just do,” he says.   
Says Ronan: “Clean out your ear, Parrish, that’s what I said.” Because he’s choosing to be difficult, and also because he doesn’t really know how to talk about it. 

He’s loved before. He knows the motions of it. But it had become something like giving up, after his father - a head tilted back to expose the length of a neck, the hole left behind after you lose a tooth, a deep bruise on a pitted fruit. Like somebody could look at him and know it was there. Poke it to make him hurt. 

Matthew was uncomplicated then and is uncomplicated now. Ronan never forgot how to love him. But he was also made to be loved in a way Ronan was not, soft-edged and laughing and kind. In the deepest depths of his sadness and anger he thought _I made him that way. I made him weak_. (An extension of the same thought: _you can’t lose something if you throw it away_.) He knows Gansey sees the difference. He knows Gansey is saddened by the difference. But he spent so many months just barely hanging on that, for a long time, he can’t quite bring himself to care. 

He does come back to himself, though. Slowly, slowly, slowly. Takes weeks off school, snarls at Gansey, fights with Declan, burns rubber off the screaming tires of the BMW. In autumn, Adam appears - so much like a dream, even before everything, that Ronan spends an inordinate amount of time wondering how he could possibly be real. The wonder morphs smoothly to jealousy, then jealousy to tolerance, tolerance to uneasy friendship. It takes a while, with Adam, and Ronan doesn’t understand why until much later. But by then the friendship isn’t uneasy anymore. 

In May: “You’re insufferable,” says Adam. It’s a stolen weekend, one of the first warm ones, which they spend baking in the sun at the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Gansey’s around somewhere, occasionally reappearing to make Ronan and Adam look at rocks, but for once he doesn’t seem to matter.   
“You don’t think that.”  
“I do. I _do,_ ” Adam says, shoving Ronan when he laughs. “I hate you. I wish I never had to see you again.”  
“You don’t hate me,” he says. “You _wish_ you hated me, maybe.” And Adam sprawls back on the grass, a million miles long, all legs and shoulders and tanned skin. He tilts his head up to look at Ronan, eyes squinting against the sun, and Ronan’s stomach twists.  
“I’m not dignifying that with a response,” Adam says, and pointedly closes his eyes - which is fine, because that means Ronan can spend a few moments unabashedly staring at him. The mountains are carefully sloping, tree-covered, sleepy. Cicadas hum in the bushes around them. They don’t find anything, but the trip feels significant anyway. 

He loves Adam for a long time. It’s hard to put a name to it, because he’s used to love being easy; his mother’s mouth pressed to the crown of his head, his father snatching him up into a hug, wrestling on the lawn with Matthew, reading comics with Declan on the porch with their elbows pressed together. Loving Adam is being pushed away as much as loving Adam is coming back, so it doesn’t connect for a while. But the clues are there. 

In November: “It’s nothing,” Adam says. Illness cuts through his voice, makes it raspy. “A cold. I don’t know. Maybe the flu. I have post nasal drip.”  
“Post Nasal Drip could be a band name,” says Ronan. Then, “stay home.”  
He’s expecting a fight. He’s already halfway through threatening to steal Adam’s car keys when Adam looks at him, eyes half shut, and shrugs. “Okay.”  
It knocks the wind out of Ronan. “Really?”  
“The quarter just ended. I can spare a weekend.”  
Late fall, early winter - the light through Adam’s window is grey and thin. Ronan is collapsed on the floor, his knees pulled up to his chin. Adam, sitting on his mattress draped in a quilt, looks thoughtfully ill and vaguely Marian. _Our Lady of Perpetual Suffering_.   
“Well, good job being smart for once,” Ronan says.  
Adam doesn’t take the bait, just smiles slightly. “Your bedside manner sucks.”  
Ronan makes a nasty face, then levers himself up to standing. “I’m gonna get you soup, and then you’ll change your tune. And don’t say you won’t eat it, you fucking ingrate, because I won’t listen.”  
_Let me take care of you,_ says the line of his shoulders. _Lie down and go to sleep,_ say his hands crammed in the pockets of his jacket. And against all expectations, Adam lies down.  
“Wow,” says Ronan. “You must really feel like shit.”  
“Don’t push it,” Adam says, a bit of snap back in his voice. The hunch of _his_ shoulders says _tired tired tired tired tired_. Ronan puts his hands up.   
“Me, push it? Never.” He yanks the quilt up so it’s covering Adam’s exposed shoulder, cuffs the top of Adam’s sleep-rumpled head. “I’ll be back in half an hour.”

It’s not a sudden snapping into place. It’s a tremulous line of thoughts as he gathers his things - about money, about leaving space, about the convenience store off the I-81 and how it’ll have saltines and soup in cans, and maybe an ice pack or a hot water bottle, too. About Adam’s face, crumpled against his pillow, about the cold bleeding into the room through the seam of the window, about lying down next to Adam and slotting into the spaces of his body, head to neck to arm to ribs to hip to leg to ankle. He thinks about warmth. He thinks about Blue’s curse. He thinks about Adam’s mouth.   
Adam cracks one eye open. “Stop staring at me, weirdo.”

He thinks the realizing should feel like dreaming - like waking up with something brand new cupped in his hands, a snapping connection, shifting a stone to strengthen the ley line. But nothing really changes, because the _act_ of loving Adam is nothing new. Loving Adam is breathing, an automatic process. Ronan’s body was doing it anyway. 

“Ronan Lynch,” says Adam. Porch-swing, book in his lap, the Barns sprawling out before them. Familiar, now - the nooks and crannies of him mapped out under Ronan’s hands, eyes, mouth. His eyes narrow. “I can hear you thinking about me.”  
“You fucking can _not_ ,” Ronan says, but he scoops up Adam’s bare foot anyway, curls his hand around the bone of his ankle. It’s a good guess because it’s usually true. Spitefully, he lets his thoughts pass on to other things; dream-cattle, the end of summer, the possibility of getting a spectacularly greasy dinner delivered directly to the swing.

He’s still something slightly fractured. But this is easy - familiar in the truest sense of the word. A known fact: he’ll get dinner delivered to Adam on a porch swing for as long as Adam will let him.   
A known fact, spoken aloud: “Hey. I love you.”  
Adam’s face, smiling. Teeth and freckles and the curve of his jaw, summer-color high in his cheeks. He digs his heel into Ronan’s thigh. “I love you too.”

**Author's Note:**

> title is sheryl crow!


End file.
